Studying at the Design Department

We are looking for students from a variety of backgrounds such as visual and performing arts, spatial design and architecture, philosophy, and computer programming. More important than prior education is a curious and self-determined research attitude and an openness to transgress predetermined disciplinary boundaries and collaborate. The Design Department furthermore welcomes students that are underrepresented in the field of design, art, education, and beyond.

Students of the Design Department apply to the programme with a project proposal, which might become the starting point for a deeper investigation of a subject matter or method. However, as students are expected to critically reflect on their own positions and assumptions, they often find themselves challenging and reformulating the very foundation of their practice. The department sees its role in stimulating and nurturing this process, supporting students in tackling their challenges and in opening up toward new discoveries.

With some exceptions, regular classes are scheduled on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. Thursdays and Fridays are usually kept open for students to work independently and further develop their projects.

Next to individual guidance and collective meetings with tutors, the writing trajectory for both the first and the second year students accompanies the ongoing research and making process. The practice of writing helps students to work through obstacles, gain new insights, develop their own voices, and learn how to articulate their work.

We furthermore plan a manifold of extracurricular activities throughout the year, such as field trips, visits to exhibitions, festivals, and conferences. Specifically invited artists, designers, and researchers contribute to the programme with their expertise by means of lectures, seminars, and workshops.

The Dirty Art Department comes from a common background of design and applied art, it seeks, however, to reject the Kantian division between the pure and the applied. Since “god is dead” and “the spectacle” is omnipresent, it sees the creation of alternative and new realities as the way to reconsider our life situation on this planet.

The Dirty Art Department is open to students from all backgrounds, including designers, artists, bankers, sceptics, optimists, economists, philosophers, sociologists, independent thinkers, poets, urban planners, farmers, anarchists, and the curious. Please enjoy the trip.

The aim of the Dirty Art Department is to develop singular practices, both individual and collective, and, regardless of medium or subject, to give an insight into how to place these practices into the existing contexts of art, design, performance, writing, pizza making, etc. The final challenge is to create new contexts, that is: the transformation of reality, or the “revolution” in contemporary terms. The Dirty Art Department promotes a strong theoretical and philosophical agenda and is open to dangerous attempts and spectacular failures. It sees itself as a journey, and wherever it stops off, it remembers that “Any Space is the Place.”

Milestones: Following the tenet of a non-pedagogic pedagogy, the department see its role as being to create situations for things to happen in: from buying one way tickets “on the road to nowhere,” initiating the occupation of Papaverweg and the creation of the autonomous living and project space Post-Norma, to the long term collaboration with the Macao Collective—including the Wandering School in 2016, a collective living and social sculpture which was nominated for the inaugural Milan Design Prize in 2017; followed by the Wandering School Part 2: Revolution or Bust! in 2018, a dérive that included meeting Franco “Bifo” Berardi as the oracle of Delphi, walking through the wilderness to Athens, clashes with Titans, a peace offering to the gods, helping to rebuild a refugee centre, regular encounters with tear gas, and just simply being there. The collective film Revolution or Bust! was presented at the third Youth Biennale of Bolzano in 2018, curated by Christian Jankowski.

Space is both a theoretical entity and a real thing—continuously informing one another. Thus the aim of the programme is to explore possibilities to work in space and to find means to act on it. Therefore the Studio looks for ways to deepen the understanding of, and knowledge about, space and guide the course participants toward critical positions that positively and productively engage with the world around them.

The Studio is set up as a post-disciplinary laboratory for testing ideas that have relevance for how we live today and how we could live tomorrow beyond the disciplines of art, design, and architecture—disciplines that continue to fail to bring about change, as they stay trapped in their inherent logics and economic systems. The question of “how to live together” serves as a guiding principle for the course’s approach. The practices developed during the course are informed by contemporary discourse on space, yet they foster independence and criticality and push for an execution on the scale of one to one, to directly engage with a given context. As artistic positions they inform the discourse of spatial practices; as design positions they propose alternative solutions with artistic means.

The Studio for Immediate Spaces invites “undisciplinary spatialists” who prefer the collective effort of making space over the alleged-ingenious gestures of the individual master. It aims to develop practices that are informed by an uncompromised and autonomous perspective in a time when critical spatial experts are so direly needed to proactively and productively shape a ecologically healthy, socially just, and beautiful world.

The programme focuses on the artistic work of the participants—helping them find their own methods, language, and tools—in addition to participative projects brought in by the team and institution. It is set up as a studio-space-led programme where students receive feedback from peers and tutors on their research, projects, and practices. The curriculum has an open structure and forms its final shape in response to the students’ different initiatives, collaborations, and developments.

The first year generated a cross-pollination of ideas and initiatives, alongside a questioning of the conditions in which the work and programme existed. Attention was on wayfinding, experimenting with new platforms, synchronizing languages, and responding to changing and challenging conditions. We moved as a department to an external self-ran location. Students campaigned for Palestinian rights and wrote an open letter to the board asking for a public statement to speak out against violence and oppression, and condemn all actions that violate human rights.

The second year started with an exhibition Disclosing Discomforts, that sketched research through action, participation, performance, and installation. The research further deepened through and in the essay that each student wrote. All together, this lead to the development of experimental practices that seek to imagine and enact ways of being together otherwise.

The programme revolves around the interaction between knowledge and imagination and how to discover new forms of documentary storytelling.
We look at the difference between fiction and truth, fact and belief systems, and fake news and honest fantasies by working with a number of different sources. In short: we critically revisit the past and speculate about possible futures.

F for Fact has a strong relation to the outside world.
At this school of second thoughts we playfully explore the nature of personal, factual, embodied, digital, and spiritual information. We actively connect with other domains through official and unofficial institutions related to the sciences, performing arts, architecture, and society itself.
Being an interdisciplinary master’s programme, the research around a subject and the form in which it is shared are closely related.

Reading, creative writing, and open discussions about hopes, fears, and dilemmas of any nature are a part of F for Fact from the beginning of the first year. The thesis prepared in the second year will be a natural follow-up to this.

A strong collective consists of a diversity of individuals who each bring their own particular qualities and identity, and see individual authorship as a matter of taking responsibility rather than a naturally expected position.

Are you permanently distracted due to a curious nature? Do you have a critical eye and an open mind? Are you an unconventional thinker and maker with a proactive nature? You’re warmly invited to apply!

Truth has always been stranger than fiction. It still is.

Please also see https://www.fforfact.net